The participants discussed how to stop the fighting in Kosovo; NATO's position had 'crystallised' in June 1998 and NATO defence ministers had met on June 10-11 to instruct the Military Committee to see how the alliance could use the full range of military capabilities to a) stop the violence, b) disengage Yugoslav forces and c) provide for negotiations.

Deputy head of the OSCE mission in Skopje, Mr. Julian Peel Yates, argued at the seminar that the June 1998 air exercise over Macedonia had aroused ambiguous feelings among the Macedonians, it was perceived as an encouragement to UCK and divided the population along ethnic lines. Furthermore it could 'lead the country on a collision course with Yugoslavia. 'Mr. Blagoj Handziski, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, also alluded to these dangers.' Later, one reads: 'Mr. Alexandros Papadogonas (Greece) noted that military intervention could result in 'ethnic cleansing' of the Serbs and lay down a dangerous precedent. Julian Yates also cautioned against the temptation to use military force to fill a political vacuum.' And 'Representatives from the region unanimously demanded to be involved in enhanced consultations prior to any operation.'

What we see here," says TFF's director, "is clear evidence that government representatives in the region as well as OSCE warned NATO's parliamentarians already in July 1998 about some of the risks involved in NATO military action: destabilisation of Macedonia, Macedonian-Yugoslav conflict and ethnic cleansing. This was a months after NATO had started looking into various options.

Evidence # 2 General Shelton warned that ethnic cleansing would increase

Sunday Times reported on March 28, "NATO Attacks," that on March 15 'Clinton and his cabinet members, including William Cohen, the defence secretary, and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, sat in silence as Shelton [General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] outlined the thrust of the analysis. There was a danger, he told them, that far from helping to contain the savagery of the Serbs in Kosovo - a moral imperative cited by the president - air strikes might provoke Serb soldiers into greater acts of butchery. Air strikes alone, Shelton stated, could not stop Serb forces from executing Kosovars.'

So, the highest American military expertise warned that military action could lead to 'butchery' and that airstrikes would not be sufficient to prevent it.

Evidence # 3 President Clinton was occupied with the Lewinsky affair

Furthermore, New York Times on April 18 and The Times, on April 19, told their readers that President Clinton took no part in planning the war: 'Distracted by the Lewinsky scandal, President Clinton was not even present at the fateful meeting last January when a plan was formed to use the threat of air power to demand Serb acceptance of a peace deal in Kosovo enforced by Nato ground troops.

The White House meeting on January 19, at which Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, successfully argued for a much tougher stance against Belgrade, was a vital moment in the build-up to war. But Mr. Clinton was preoccupied with his impeachment trial, according to a report yesterday in The New York Times that paints a picture of a President whose attention was focused elsewhere as Kosovo erupted. At the January meeting Ms. Albright overcame the reservations of other senior advisers and the plan, demanding Serb acceptance of NATO troops in Kosovo under threat of force for the first time, was sent for approval to Mr. Clinton, who was at the moment preparing his State of the Union address while the US Senate listened to arguments on whether he should be thrown out of office.'

Jan Oberg comments, "With this background and looking at the febrile rethoric and failure of the bombing campaign on its own criteria - creating peace and stability in Europe, preventing a humanitarian catastrophe and forcing Belgrade to accept all the West's conditions - one is increasingly lead to believe, rather, that the whole catastrophe we witness now was CAUSED by leading decision-makers ignoring early warnings from the region and top-level military expertise, by the US President being 'distracted' and by bad judgment and a gross underestimation of the complexity and of what was at stake. Or, you may say, by a dangerous combination of hubris and human folly, of too much military power combined with too little intellectual power.

Until we are shown empirical evidence of a grand Yugoslav ethnic cleansing plan and until we get some good answers from President Clinton, Secretary of State Albright, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, State Department spokesman James Rubin and NATO spokesman Jamie Shea to why NATO chose to go ahead against the above-mentioned warnings and obvious risks, there is little reason to believe their words.

The said plan probably exists only in various propaganda departments in NATO capitals. Truth-seeking journalists should keep on pounding questions about these matters. Why? Because a humanitarian NATO mission that has to be explained and legitimised on such factually lose and morally dubious grounds, must give cause for grave concern. It comes after the trick of calling the Rambouillet Dictate a 'peace plan.'

I am reminded of what George Braque is believed to have once said: that truth always exists, whereas in contrast, lies have to be invented."

c TFF 1999

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